Stanislaw Lem Biography

With the possible exception of France's Jules Verne, Polish
author Stanislaw Lem (1921–2006) has been the best-known
science fiction writer to work in a language other than English. His
books have been translated into more than 40 languages, with total
sales estimated at some 27 million copies by 2006.

Lem's highly philosophical novels were quite different in style and
content from the largely adventure-oriented science fiction popular in the
West, most of which he mercilessly disparaged; the Science Fiction
Writers' Association in the United States revoked his honorary
membership in a celebrated 1976 incident. His writing, often grim but
leavened by dry humor, was shaped by influences specific to the time and
place in which he lived. Yet Lem's popularity was truly
international. At the height of the Cold War he commanded a large
readership in both the United States and the Soviet Union, and his single
best-known work, the 1961 novel
Solaris
, was filmed by both countries. His work was generally readable and
entertaining, and he told Peter Swirski, in an interview published in
A Stanislaw Lem Reader
, "I am a staunch adherent to the maxim that literature, much as
philosophy, should never bore its readers to death."

Father Escaped Execution

Stanislaw Lem was born in the Polish city of Lvov (now Lviv, Ukraine) on
September 12, 1921. His family was of Jewish background, although Lem
himself was never religiously observant. One theme that marked his writing
was

that of the arbitrariness of life. Lem himself wrote in his memoir
Highcastle
that "I really don't know when it was that I first
experienced the surprise that I existed, surprise accompanied by a touch
of fear that I could just as easily have not existed, or been a stick, or
a dandelion, or a goat's leg, or a snail." Perhaps that
attitude was rooted in Lem's own experiences and those of his
family as they lived through the terrible upheavals of Europe in the
twentieth century. Before Lem was born, his father was nearly executed by
a firing squad (he was saved by the last-minute intervention of a friend),
and Lem himself had brushes with death during World War II.

After things settled down in newly independent Poland, however, the Lem
family prospered. Lem's father was an otolaryngologist, and his son
was fascinated by the drawings in his medical books. "Each volume
[of a German otolaryngology handbook] had no fewer than a thousand glossy
pages," Lem wrote in
Highcastle
. "There I could look at heads cut open in various ways,
innumerable ways, the whole machinery drawn and colored with the utmost
precision." Lem developed a knack for detailed scientific
description and combined it with a rich fantasy life—he was not an
especially happy child, and he wrote that "as a young boy I
certainly terrorized those around me." He enjoyed reading, and
early in life he encountered the writings of science fiction pioneers H.G.
Wells and Jules Verne.

In 1939 Lem graduated from secondary school in Lvov and enrolled at the
Lvov Medical Institute just as Soviet troops overran the city in the early
days of World War II. The
city soon fell to the German army, placing Lem and his family in grave
danger. They pulled strings and obtained forged documents that did not
identify them as Jewish, enabling them to remain in the city. His medical
education put on hold, Lem worked as an auto mechanic; he soon learned, as
he was quoted as saying in the
Times
of London, "to damage German vehicles in such a way that it
wouldn't immediately be discovered." He later worked as a
welder in a German-owned scrap yard. Lem was active in Poland's
Jewish anti-Nazi resistance, smuggling arms into the Krakow ghetto from
which he eventually saw most of his Jewish friends deported to their
deaths. In 1944, after the Soviets displaced the Germans from Lvov, he
resumed his medical classes.

In 1946, with Lvov having been absorbed into the Soviet Union, he moved to
Krakow, Poland, which remained his home for much of the rest of his life.
Lem worked slowly toward a medical degree at the Jagiellonian University
in Krakow, but his family had lost all of its property during the war, and
he was essentially penniless. To make ends meet he began to write pulp
fiction for magazines and poetry for a Catholic weekly newspaper. Among
his friends was Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II. Lem finished his
studies in 1948 but intentionally flunked his final exams because he
realized that he would likely be conscripted as a military doctor if he
passed. He was also dismayed by the ideological control over the sciences
that the Soviet Union was beginning to exert in Poland.

Worked in Socialist Realist Genre

That decision left writing as Lem's most promising career option.
At first he tried to adapt himself to the tenets of Socialist Realism, the
officially improved style of the Communist world, with realistic,
optimistic plots in which science and industry ultimately work for the
good of the people. He repeatedly rewrote his novel
Szpital Przemieniena
(Hospital of the Transfiguration) in an attempt to please Polish censors.
In 1951, almost by accident, Lem turned to science fiction. After a casual
discussion with a publishing official about the lack of science fiction in
Polish, he received a book contract in the mail, with a blank space for
the title. He filled in the blank with "Astronauci"
("Astronauts") and quickly delivered the promised
manuscript. With his fortunes on the rise, Lem married Barbara Leszniak, a
radiologist, in 1953. In 1968 the two had a son, Tomasz, who later became
curator of a website devoted to Lem's works.

In later life Lem spoke negatively about
Astronauts
and his other early novels like
Oblok Magellana
(The Magellan Nebula, 1955), but these books gained him a wide readership
in Poland.
Czas nieutracony
(Time Not Lost) dealt with life in Nazi-occupied Poland. Lem found that
literary authorities considered science fiction a trivial genre and
exercised less oversight when it came to his works in that genre. After
the Soviet Union repressed a revolt by Hungarian reformers in 1956, Lem
began to write science fiction prolifically. He never explicitly
positioned himself as a dissident with respect to Poland's
Communist regime, but some of his works had a satirical streak that might
have caused him trouble in any genre other than science fiction.

Iskry
(Eden, 1959) was one of Lem's first fully characteristic novels,
built on the science fiction convention of a spaceship crew discovering a
remote and mysterious planet, but emerging in the end as skeptical about
the possibility of human communication with cultures whose technology
might differ fundamentally from that found on earth. Two years later Lem
published
Solaris
, which remains his best-known work.
Solaris
, again, was outwardly a science fiction adventure: the inhabitants of a
space station encounter a mostly water-covered planet whose ocean seems to
have intelligent properties. As the crew tries to communicate with this
radically different life form and then attacks it in frustration, a
bewildering disaster occurs: the ocean creates physical manifestations of
their deepest fears.
Solaris
was filmed by Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972, and an American
version directed by Steven Soderbergh was filmed in 2002, with actor
George Clooney in the lead role.

Other Lem novels and stories also featured space explorers as
protagonists, although Lem often introduced a note of satire and a
psychological edge that left the reader quite distant from triumphant
Star Trek
territory in the end. His writings featured two recurring characters. The
adventures of astronaut Ijon Tichy (who appeared in
Dzienniki Gwiazdowe
(Star Diaries and Memoirs of a Space Traveler, 1971) commented either
directly or indirectly on the militarism and bureaucracy of Earth's
own societies. Nathan M. Powers wrote on the Modern Word website that
"Tichy lives in a universe teeming with life, where humanity
jostles shoulders with creatures bizarre and grotesque, yet somehow always
familiar, for this is a world where humanity's flaws and virtues
are writ large across the stars. These stories may be read as sharp social
satire, depicting the bizarre customs of other places to drive home
surprising points about our own; they have been aptly compared to the
philosophical fictions of Swift and Voltaire."

Pirx the Pilot, who appeared in a series of Lem's short stories,
was an ordinary man living in a world that science had made bizarre. Lem
in the Pirx stories, unlike other science fiction authors, accurately
described the dullness as well as the psychological challenges that would
face an interplanetary traveler, and his writings generally extrapolated
from firm groundings in scientific fact. One of the Ijon Tichy novels,
Pokoj na ziemi
(Peace on Earth, 1987) fused satirical themes with up-to-the minute
science: Earth has temporarily rid itself of war by setting machines loose
on the Moon to fight battles in which no humans are hurt, but soon the
Earth is threatened with invasion from its own now-malevolent lunar
machines. Tichy is sent to the moon to investigate, but he is subjected to
a procedure in which the right hemisphere of his brain is disconnected
from the left, leaving him unable to speak.

Wrote Experimental Works

Many of Lem's writings pushed the imagination of the reader to its
limits in the worlds they conjured, and he wrote some works that fell into
the experimental category even as they retained a strain of humor.
Cyberiada
(The Cyberiad,
1965) features traveling robots as its central characters; humans are
present only as minor characters who are disliked by the robots for their
mushy consistency.
Bezsennosc
(1971, translated as
The Futurological Congress
) depicts an Earth transformed by the introduction of mind-altering drugs
into the atmosphere; the hero, Tichy, cannot separate reality from a
texture of interlocking mass hallucinations.

Some of Lem's books abandoned science fiction altogether;
Doskonala proznia
(1971, translated as
A Perfect Vacuum
) consisted of a set of reviews of nonexistent books written at some point
in the future. (In several books Lem seemed to anticipate the
"information overload" that would become a feature of the
Internet age.) He also wrote nonfiction science commentaries such as
Summa technologiae
(1964), a play, literary essays, and magazine articles. Lem remained
prolific for several decades; some two dozen of his books were translated
into English (mostly by American writer Michael Kandel directly from
Polish, but some from German or French editions of Lem's work), but
many others remain available only in Polish or other languages.

Lem moved briefly to Austria after the Polish government cracked down on
the Solidarity labor union in the early 1980s, but he soon returned to
Krakow. He did not write fiction for some years after the dissolution of
Communist rule in Eastern Europe in 1989, but remained in good health and
continued to lead an active literary life. Although he had never used his
pen to attack one-party rule directly, it seemed that the experience of
living under totalitarianism had inspired his work at some level. Both
before and after the fall of Communism, however, Lem was paraded by the
Polish State as a kind of national culture hero, and he was given the
Polish State Prize for Literature in 1976. Lem's writings of the
1990s remain mostly untranslated. He died in Krakow on March 27, 2006.

Books

Davis, J. Madison,
Stanislaw Lem
, Starmont, 1990.

Lem, Stanislaw,
Highcastle: A Remembrance
, Harcourt Brace, 1995.

St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers
, 4th ed., St. James, 1996.